Abstract
As ‘globalization’ becomes hot buzzword, designers begin to deal with culture in serious manner than ever. However, in design field, major topics in cultural design have been limited mainly around identifying aesthetic stereotypes such as national shape or color preferences. Furthermore, major methods of cultural design were limited only in designer’s personal intuition or pencil and paper survey that requires time and effort. Considering these background and needs of the study, the study sets the objective as ‘to develop frameworks of design methods for cross-cultural collaborative design project.’ At first, culture was defined as one having structure with multi-layers including ‘artifact’, ‘value’, and ‘basic assumptions’ which have different degrees of concreteness and tangibility. The nature of culture was followed by to address the issues of how culture is analyzed and compared and how culture can be modeled. The Concept of ‘Cultural Variables’ was introduced as means to profile cultural characteristics and compare them with other cultures. Similarly, the structure of design was analyzed, which identified key design attributes including ‘functional’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘symbolic.’ Based on the structure of culture and design, methodological framework for cross-cultural study is proposed: using cultural variables bridging implicit layer of culture and explicit layer of design characteristics. Finally, a tool of web- based cross-cultural study was developed, which allows user to participate in the study in his own environment and collects information effectively. .
Keywords
cross-culture, collaboration, design methods
Citation
Lee, K. (2004) Design Methods for Cross-Cultural Collaborative Design Project., in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and de Bono, A (eds.), Futureground - DRS International Conference 2004, 17-21 November, Melbourne, Australia. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2004/researchpapers/128
Design Methods for Cross-Cultural Collaborative Design Project.
As ‘globalization’ becomes hot buzzword, designers begin to deal with culture in serious manner than ever. However, in design field, major topics in cultural design have been limited mainly around identifying aesthetic stereotypes such as national shape or color preferences. Furthermore, major methods of cultural design were limited only in designer’s personal intuition or pencil and paper survey that requires time and effort. Considering these background and needs of the study, the study sets the objective as ‘to develop frameworks of design methods for cross-cultural collaborative design project.’ At first, culture was defined as one having structure with multi-layers including ‘artifact’, ‘value’, and ‘basic assumptions’ which have different degrees of concreteness and tangibility. The nature of culture was followed by to address the issues of how culture is analyzed and compared and how culture can be modeled. The Concept of ‘Cultural Variables’ was introduced as means to profile cultural characteristics and compare them with other cultures. Similarly, the structure of design was analyzed, which identified key design attributes including ‘functional’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘symbolic.’ Based on the structure of culture and design, methodological framework for cross-cultural study is proposed: using cultural variables bridging implicit layer of culture and explicit layer of design characteristics. Finally, a tool of web- based cross-cultural study was developed, which allows user to participate in the study in his own environment and collects information effectively. .